Minus Forty-One
by Ember Nickel
Summary: "The winner's forced to transfer to another school where he or she is...instructed instead to lead a normal life." And, after all, the Program is designed so that anybody could potentially win...Drabble sequence, AUs, mixes all continuities.


Boy 7, Yoshitoki Koninobu

Everyone understands, there's not supposed to be any kind of a welcome back. You win the game by having all of your classmates, friends and lovers and rivals and enemies, die. There is nobody left to celebrate on your behalf. And every time around, parents are reminded about the horrors of the Program (the wholesale slaughter of teenagers quickly becomes routine when it's not your own flesh and blood involved) and die for their response. So it shouldn't be strange to have nowhere to come home to.

And yet Ryoko Anno weeps for the champion who was alone all along.

Girl 18, Fumiyo Fujiyoshi

They think she's burned everything from that time. Her school uniform, the weapon she got assigned, the weapons she picked up one by one along the way, the pack, everything she brought on what was supposed to be a school trip, completely sent up in flames almost as soon as she was clear of the water in every direction. Or maybe fire was too slow. It wouldn't have been the first time she'd caused an explosion.

They're almost right. But what nobody knows is that she still has all of the misspelled notes that Yutaka wrote to her, in silence.

Girl 14, Mayumi Tendo

The new school where she transfers is a far cry from Shiroiwa. The city is so much bigger, and everything seems so fast-moving. At least there are no real deadlines, at least not that she cares about.

What she doesn't expect is how popular she becomes, without trying. After just a few months, there are several boys asking her out, and after ignoring the first few she's able to signal her interest to the really attractive jocks. Until they learn she's never been in a gang and doesn't have a very impressive criminal record, they think her scars are beautiful.

Boy 1, Yoshio Akamatsu

There he goes. That's him. You heard he won the Program? At his old school? See how enormous he is? It's muscle. All of it. That's what I heard. You think he'll go out for sports? For us? No. Course not. Like he'd think that's worth his time. Well, better get out of his way. Yeah.

It feels good, to be the feared one for a change. He lets the stories spread.

And if there's something he's missing out on, some kind of friendship he never really had before or after the Program, he doesn't seem to know or care.

Girl 5, Izumi Kanai

She can barely believe a dissident takes the trouble to track her down. And she's so flabbergasted that she stammers out an honest answer—yes, the government is sloppy plenty of times, they're not incredibly stable. They could be taken down.

So why does nobody try?

Because anyone who would get close would have to be even more ruthless and barbaric than the government, of course. And those people are not to be trusted for long. Better to be on the side of stability. Or to create stability, for yourself alone.

The dissident, having made her stupidity known, is eliminated quietly.

Boy 9, Hiroshi Kuronaga

There's this boy a year younger than him. Apparently some kind of flunkout who's only hanging on at school thanks to some financial inducements from his business executive father (whether to the kid himself or the faculty, it's not really clear).

And so, he bullies the flunkout into starting his own gang, basically adopting the other wannabes who would otherwise be clinging around the ill-tempered transfer student. Because, really, they're all morons who he doesn't have any time for. Intimidating girls, graffiting blackboards, demanding second helpings of lunch that doesn't even taste good? Kid stuff. He was never that dumb.

Boy 10, Ryuhei Sasagawa

For a few months after they move, his brother is—incongruously—a model student. The whole family's proud of him. Without Kiriyama around to bail him out of trouble, he might as well turn over a new leaf and apply himself.

Then it stops. His grades drop, he cuts class, but he can't find it in him to start real trouble. So he eventually wanders back and just writes in the margins.

When they ask him why, he says he can't imagine becoming part of the system, scaring families like that again. Even when his brother reminds him that he came back.

Boy 17, Mitsuru Numai

When he joins the police, it's hard work learning regulations. You can't just shoot at any bystanders you want to—well, actually, you can, but it looks better if you follow protocol about it at first. And you need to practice on dummy targets, to gain efficiency.

But he buckles down and gets to work. Promotion follows promotion, and within a decade of graduating he's one of the highest-ranking officers in the prefecture.

Success, he thinks, is just a matter of believing that you can do it. Knowing you're good enough, you're no man's inferior. And outlaws will get what's theirs.

Girl 4, Sakura Ogawa

Her brother is so glad to see her alive that they embrace and weep, and there's no need for words.

Which is good. Because she doesn't need to know that, while part of him feared for her safety, the rest of him was going mad with the betting markets. The collars would explode, everyone was convinced, all the gambles would be off. They didn't. It was just, nobody could have determined what price Kazuhiko would pay for her. Nobody calculated the odds that the winner would shove her bag back beforehand, and never touch a weapon all the game through.

Boy 21, Kazuhiko Yamomoto

There are lots of beautiful girls out there in the rest of the world. And lots of kind ones and brave ones too. So the odds are good that even if he set some high, combined standards, he could still find a very suitable girlfriend.

He doesn't try. Not because Sakura was that exceptional. Part of him is afraid she wasn't.

Because, if she wasn't, and he avenged her with a singleminded passion anyway, gunning down his classmates one by one—he doesn't want to know what that makes him.

Better if he doesn't date anyone, and never has to wonder.

Girl 3, Megumi Eto

She keeps the personal letter from the poohbah who sends them out. It's a lot better souvenir than anything she actually packed for the class trip, which turned out to be kind of a bust.

She never winds up using that cell phone. It's not like she has any friends in Shiroiwa left to call. And besides, her family gave it to her meaning well, but she didn't need to rely on it by the end. It was the invisible things they gave her, strength and faith and the ability to keep going whatever people say, that mattered far more.

Boy 3, Tatsumichi Oki

His last year at his new school, the handball team makes the national tournament. They're trading notes on the remaining contenders when one of his new rivals casually mentions having defeated Shiroiwa Senior High at the regional level.

Plucky underdogs, he's told, when he perks up and asks for more. No shortage of team spirit, and they work surprisingly well together, but ultimately just too small a class to go far.

He supposes that there was a class 9A, too, who would have produced just enough upperclassmen to field a team. It's been a while since he thought about them.

Boy 20, Kyoichi Motobuchi

Their second move comes on the heels of the first—his father is too important to leave his governmental job, and soon enough they're all not too far from Shiroiwa, with his father back managing environmental affairs. Despite its many foibles, the government is considerate about maintaining its natural resources. After all, it's going to survive well into the future.

With his good grades and better connections, he becomes a teacher when he grows up. Finally, at last, a generation of ninth graders have an answer when they wonder when they'll ever need to know the quadratic formula in real life.

Girl 7, Yumiko Kusaka

Her name is withheld pending identification. Everyone's name is withheld pending identification. The Program directors are a bit concerned at the slow speed of the process, but once her collar is inspected there's no longer any question, and things proceed on as normal.

They inform her family that there's nothing to be concerned about, it's probably just a tic that she picked up from one of the other finalists.

But she remembers the megaphone, how her friends had flocked to her voice, and what they'd turned out to be in the end. And it's several months before she speaks again.

Girl 6, Yukiko Kitano

She didn't expect it to happen like this. Without Yumiko, why bother getting dragged to the Halo Church anymore? It's not like her parents know anyone there, either, now that they're making the long drive every week to a different building in another city.

But she's grown up, a lot, and deep down she knows she's too old to be dragged anywhere. She's looking to the divine for healing and for forgiveness. And looking to the earthly, to the people all around her, to maybe make new friends who don't see her as anything but a child. To begin again.

Boy 8, Yoji Kuramoto

He tells himself he wants to fall in love. Sometimes he tells girls who and what he is, and they close off and drift away. Sometimes he doesn't, and they flirt back just as energetically—but emptily—as he does.

That's not actually what he wants, although even he doesn't know it. What he wants is for them to fall for him, to be taken care of. Like he would have done for them, if they'd been through so much that they'd seen enough and need someone else to do it all. It's just, none of them know what he wants either.

Girl 21, Yoshimi Yahami

She drinks. She smokes. She drives fast cars. Among other vehicles. She doodles on her skin, and then stops. She tries out for a half dozen sports teams and makes two of them, but doesn't bother to play out the season in either case. She experiments with many different types of sexual partners, mind-altering drugs, and suppressed music.

Because, she thinks, she should have done all of that before. Then if she'd been killed, she'd at least lived have first. But she thinks that this is the next best thing. For herself, and for everyone who'll never get the chance.

Boy 16, Kazushi Niida

Turns out, being a virgin isn't all that different from being someone who's happened to have had sex.

And being a normal human being isn't all that different from being someone who's happened to have killed a fifteen-year-old.

Or maybe that's just him, itching for a new challenge. Assault was the most pleasurable when he had a goal in mind, but nothing can beat the rush of the Program. In the rest of the world, assignments and deadlines can be blown aside.

In this regard, as he misses childhood games, he is perhaps most similar to other former ninth graders.

Girl 13, Takako Chigusa

They move from the smallest prefecture on the smallest island to the largest prefecture on the northernmost island. Nobody teases her about being cold. Cold is a thing to be.

She comes near the beginning of a streak of winning girls. Her sister, Ayoko, asks if she's proud. She tells her there's nothing to be proud of.

Ayoko can barely remember her before the beginning of her track career, and that's what scares her. She wasn't destined to be on the run. It's just, sometimes she feels like she's still running, across the island, and won't ever get to stop.

Girl 20, Kaori Minami

After an infinitesimal moment of utter loneliness, there comes the part where every winner gets back in the world, but more so. Instead of being encompassed by the tools of the government, their bodies are merely seen. But there is perhaps no population so ambivalent about being photographed so many times over—identified to the government, broadcast to gamblers, blasted on the news, chronicled for profitable narratives—given that they are both desperate to number among celebrities and horrified by their own appearance, with the spotlight announcing and distorting them, as famished, exhausted, bloodstained ninth-grade girls.

The acne fades. The scars don't.

Boy 14, Sho Tsukioka

He doesn't have that many friends to fall back on, which is really unfortunate, given how many powerful and intimidating allies he had just a week prior. But it doesn't help that they're all dead.

Instead, mostly by reminding people of who he is and rhetorically asking them whether they'd like to mess with him, he makes his way between hideouts, then survives a bout of seasickness on the last ship before he washes up in San Francisco, ready for a new life. The republic had its moments, but on balance there was more room for him on the island.

Girl 10, Hirono Shimizu

In the nightmares she's waiting, hiding out until someone finds her and helps her forward to wherever she's going. Then it's a new dream, but somehow the same one. She's back at work, but it's her bosses and clients who've sold her out, and she has to mow them down before they realize she knows she's been betrayed. Hair cut short both outside her brain and inside her mind, she tests the familiar grip of a gun she hasn't held for years.

There's a disconnect between the two moments, but in the logic of the dream it all makes sense.

Boy 2, Keita Iijima

He doesn't miss the weapons that he gathered along the way. With his new school uniforms, and more competent teachers than Shiroiwa ever had, there's no reason to bring a gun to class.

But every once in a while he finds himself thinking that, by getting rid of the supplies he'd so carefully accumulated, he wasted a perfectly good bulletproof vest. It was still in fine working order. And even if he didn't expect anyone to start shooting at him, well, it couldn't hurt, just to have around. You never knew what would happen. If only it wasn't so bulky.

Boy 12, Yutaka Seto

He doesn't find it strange that his new friends laugh at his jokes or gasp at his world-weary jibes. They're his friends. Of course they respect him. But then he starts listening, and realizes that most of the class holds him in the same awe.

That's how he sees that he's only become truly close to a few of them. Nobodies who make him look even cooler in comparison—but not just anybody in the class. Their admiration isn't enough, without some reciprocal feelings of friendship on his part. With relief he'll never explain, he at last knows Shinji wasn't faking.

Boy 19, Shinji Mimura

His uncle is still concerned about him. If the classmates he wants to avenge are the same ones that, in some cases, he himself killed, what's the point? Better not to get too abstract, to have people that you can love and can live for.

He tries to explain, they would only have been liabilities at that point. What does his uncle want, anyway? Him to have never been radicalized, content with basketball as challenge enough? For better but mostly for worse, this is the winner the government has created.

This is the winner, he promises, they'll learn to fear.

Boy 4, Toshinori Oda

He's a good violinist. Not an exceptional one.

People have seen his like before, it's not like there's a shortage of well-supported and motivated ninth graders out there. Admirable form, a clear work ethic, not prone to stupid mistakes. Skillful. If the music lacks a certain something, has no emotional additions? He's hardly the first to struggle with that aspect of the learning curve. If he outgrows it, wonderful. If not, well, it's easy enough to look down on the artistic sensibilities of any given day and age. He carries on, faster and faster, as coolly and accurately as ever.

Boy 18, Tadakatsu Hatagami

He loves baseball as much as ever. Repetitive drills, superstitious rituals, reassuring bromides that, as a hitter, failure is more common than success. One of his new teammates cites a different source: since the game is so punctured by solitary at-bats, even the best team player can be concerned with individual success first.

When he protests—isn't that an American quote?—he is reminded that Americans invented the game, with a considerable historical debt owed to England. Better not to think to deeply about geopolitics, anyway. Just find the sweet spot, wait for your pitch. Take your cuts. Repeat. Again and again.

Boy 13, Yuichiro Takaguchi

He writes to the official who sent him a congratulatory letter, thanking him and the establishment effusively for their reward. It wasn't easy, after all! Perhaps they can recommend some employment options for previous winners? Have the others gone on to achieve great things? It's such a wonderful boost to one's confidence, one knows. He doesn't mean to impose, but if they've initiated the conversation, taking their time to welcome him into the company of the elite, it's the least he can do to respond cordially. Maybe if he has another letter, he'll believe it's real.

They never write back.

Girl 16, Yuka Nagakawa

She never tells anyone, at her new school. They wouldn't have known, if it hadn't been for one of the older students, a gambler who recognizes her face from the broadcasts.

Even then, some of them still don't believe it. They come around, eventually, when he reminds them that almost all winners go crazy. And the way she tries so hard to cheer up everyone else? To be there for the bullied kids, the nerds and the overweight ninth-graders and the other transfers? Without ever letting on who she is? By consensus, they agree: she has to be completely insane.

Girl 19, Chisato Matsui

She's barely settled into her new city, and she looks like she's lived there all fifteen years of her life. She knows the shortcuts like the locals—how to roll out of bed and into class in a minimum of time, how to cheaply throw together the same tasteless groceries, which teachers' classes to put effort into and which can be used as study hall or a chance to nap.

After a while, she's so stuck in her ways, concerned about saving the tiniest scraps of money and time, that she's never branching out. Finally, she looks like a transfer student.

Girl 2, Yukie Utsumi

She studies political science, sometimes thoughtfully, sometimes breezing through it. Gradually, she abandons the theoretical exercises and stakes her own way through the corridors of power.

There are pitfalls with systems of majority vote. A coalition of five can dominate a court of nine. Three can sway five. Two can control three. Inductively, a rigorous mathematical proof can be given. In real life, it's better to trust heuristics. Systems can break down, people can refuse to take the long view. People with the luxury of free time will call some behavior paradoxical. Everyone else calls it nothing, and just acts.

Girl 17, Satomi Noda

People tell her not to worry when she needs extensions in university, and can't sleep except during her second class of the day. It's only natural. Teenagers' biological clocks are always off, the scheduling is horrific, it's just silly adults defining the world by whatever most suits their generation.

She goes back and forth about what to make of them. Some weeks she believes she has the potential for more, and wakes up early to scrawl with empty eyes. Other weeks, she gives up any pretense of a normal schedule, clinging to the idea that she's just a normal teenager.

Girl 12, Haruka Tanizawa

She's a little reluctant to start dating, but it sounds like stupid fun, and some dumb jocks in her grade look, while enormous, neither fast or threatening. She's more fearless than before, if more numb.

They all end in breakups. Messy ones, shouted out across the bleachers or lunchroom or city square. The boys, jilted, are able to spin it against her and run off to their next crush. And maybe she could let them drift away, quietly, but it's not fair. If they break something, even as insubstantial as her heart, they should have to pay for it, too.

Girl 9, Yuko Sakaki

In the new city, there's a new doctor, who she doesn't mind talking with quite as much. He's a crazy person doctor, but her parents remind her there are a lot of crazy people out there. Crazy people who think the Program is okay, just because it's normal. Maybe if she talks with the doctor, it'll set a good example for the rest of them.

It can be crazy to trust anybody, to ever make friends. To have any kind of faith. But her parents have more than enough for her. And sometimes, maybe always, she needs to be crazy.

Boy 11, Hiroki Sugimura

At first he's one of the more advanced students in his martial arts class, but he soon stops going. For one, he's easily distracted. Instead of remembering how to execute classic maneuvers, he wonders what would be the most effective way to fight back if weaponry were no limitation. And, considering all the possibilities, he can commit to nothing at all.

Even that wouldn't be so bad, if he still believed in a way of fighting that's restricted to self-defense. But it's impossible to focus when part of him is yearning for revenge against a system too big to grasp.

Girl 8, Kayoko Kotohiki

For years she's followed every law set down by the republic, no matter how bizarre. Her parents, independently, have assured her she'll go far. But once she's already gone farther away from home than she wants, things are different.

It's not until she finds the cat that she also finds a minor recommendation to disregard. Apparently they're supposed to spay and neuter strays, so the population doesn't grow out of hand. But this animal has managed to evade detection so far, and she can't bring herself to turn it in. The kittens follow shortly after, and she keeps them all.

Girl 11, Mitsuko Souma

She doesn't recognize the man she passes in the streets, in the new city. If he recognizes her, it's only an excuse to hurry up. At least to him, her presence is as threatening there as it's ever been.

It takes him a while to, very carefully, ask the right questions to the right people and find out that yes, the government moved her here, but no, they're no threat to him. For once they've forgotten about him. By the time her first father finds her, she's as grateful as ever—though of course, she doesn't really need his magic anymore.

Girl 1, Mizuho Inada

Life is a game, and if the difficulty level seems to go down over time, there are always hidden nuances. Staying out of the way and waiting was effective enough during the Program, and it'll be effective during the next level, too. Don't call attention to yourself. Give thanks for your progress, aloud or silently. You don't know if you'll get a second chance.

Try and meet people, if you can. They might be real people like you, teammates. But there's no telling whether they're actually just challenges to be brushed aside and eliminated without regret, ghosts in the machine.

Boy 6, Kazuo Kiriyama

He goes into business and trades fortunes and futures from a distance at the top of a skyscraper. Deciding what to do with his wealth is much more challenging than accumulating it ever was. Maintaining the comfortable lifestyle he's enjoyed since childhood is easy enough, but there's nobody else he wants to spend it on.

Someone tells him that if he donates a pittance to support some orphanages, he'll make himself look good. While he's not entirely sure why he complies, it's not as uncomfortable as some of the other suits that people told him would make him look good.

Boy 5, Shogo Kawada

The Program administrator marvels at his cunning. Stringing them along only to kill them in the end. Very impressive, if—by his standards—an underwhelming victory. This class was mostly obliging enough to take care of each other, he just had to wrap up the loose ends.

And yet, for all their weaknesses, Class 3B didn't have any of the friends who'd known each other for years grow callous enough to win. It was only the hardened transfer student who betrayed them. If you wanted to teach a country not to trust, their class just might have been the greatest possible disappointment.

Girl 15, Noriko Nagakawa

She could be on a boat or a helicopter leaving the island, or just stuck in the abandoned schoolhouse. It doesn't really matter—she'd be unsteady and shaking just as much.

She reaches for another bite to eat. It's going to be the first of so many more bites she'll get to eat, cooked food, she can hardly believe it. It makes up for the tastelessness in the moment.

"We had such high hopes for this class, you know. You were on pace to break the record! And then...it all slowed down."

"I'm sorry," she shrugs. "I guess I'm nobody special."

Boy 15, Shuya Nanahara

"Who are they?"

He doesn't remember taking the picture out. Another one of life's unfairnesses, that of all the things he'd want to wipe from his mind, so many are still there. And yet reaching for the creased Polaroid has become second nature.

Once again he holds it and stares past the folds that can't be smoothed over, beyond the bloodstains. He sees Yoshitoki's head, decapitated by the frame, and takes in Noriko's face again before refolding the photograph and returning it to his heart pocket.

He knows it's too much of an answer, and not enough of one. "Friends."


End file.
